The Implicate Order are a free jazz trio featuring trombonist
Steve Swell, bassist Ken Filiano, and drummer Lou Grassi. This CD captures them live at the Auditório do Forum Cultural do Seixal near Lisbon, Portugal. Local saxophonists
Rodrigo Amado (baritone) and
Paulo Curado (alto, soprano) join for the last two pieces, "Avant Fado Meeting" and "Everything Is Everything." The latter, penned by Grassi (all the others are three-way collaborations), is not to be confused with the
Lauryn Hill song of the same name. The music is unremittingly "out" -- those unfamiliar with the aesthetics of avant-garde jazz will find little to grab on to. If you're hungry for the relative comfort of a defined tempo, jump right to the flat-out grooving "Dance of the Expatriates." But the intellectual/spiritual thrust of the music may provide another window of accessibility. The trio takes their name from David Bohm's book Wholeness and the Implicate Order. As is clear from titles like "For When Tathagatas Walk the Earth" and "Bohm's Gnostic," these forbidding colloquies posit links between science and religion, or more specifically, theoretical physics and Buddhism. They can also be heard as a meta-commentary on the discipline of free improvisation itself. ~ David R. Adler